I've noticed by playing Sword a few times, that Leon's levels are quite a big leap from Eternatus, and there's like very little wriggle room for grinding between that and the Leon battle, which often meant I took more than 1 try to beat him due to being underlevelled. Hop also seemed to be egging me to take on Leon, but was it possible I could have actually went to grind despite what he said to get on more even level footing?